Elizabeth Buchan's favourite books that will push you to be bold and brave and to never give up

I have always been fascinated by secret undercover operations and by the Second World War.

The two are meshed in this autobiography of a young cryptographic genius who was recruited into the SOE to help sort out our coding disasters and improve security for the agents. It is brilliantly funny, savage, and desperately moving.

His poem, "The Life That I Have, Is All That I Have" was written for his fiancée who was killed. He later gave it to Violette Szabo (see Carve Her Name with Pride) to encode her messages undercover in France before her capture and death. He inspired me to write my SOE novels.

Who washed the socks and boiled the eggs for the so-called Lake Poets? Or any poet, for that matter? The answer is almost certainly their sisters, wives and daughters. 

This is an account of the gifted, long-suffering, often tormented, coterie of women who laboured in the shadow of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. Connected by blood as well as marriage, the women were very different, but each was as trapped as the other by their gender.

The emotional fallout resulted in illnesses, neurosis, and deep unhappiness. Like her father, Sara Coleridge was an opium addict. Dorothy Wordsworth was consumed by love for her brother, and Emily Southey was a depressive.

I was very struck by the struggles to gain expression and to be treated as intellectual equals. Their stories made me determined never to be hampered from writing my own. I thought of those women as I wrote one of my books.

As a plain, awkward child, I was invariably drawn to stories of women who made waves, a habit which never left me.

Georgiana Spencer was born to beauty, position, and influence. In short, she had everything. Later, as the stylish and influential and fabulously rich, but unhappily married Duchess of Devonshire, she battled a self-destructive streak.

Her solution was to enmesh herself in politics, and in this skillful, riveting biography it is possible to see how our political institutions began to evolve into what they are today via her involvement.

Sex, stately homes, beautiful women, fashion, dashing lovers, her early death… this book has it all, and I can never resist it.

It is all the fault of the corridor… I’ve always been fascinated by the family – what is a family, how does it function?

But where did we get the idea that it should be a tight nuclear unit? In medieval times, family encompassed a swathe of relations and hangers-on who lived together in large unprivate households.

When I stumbled across Lawrence Stone’s controversial, but utterly compelling, analysis of the changes that resulted in the modern nuclear family, I was hooked. Once corridors, which allowed rooms with doors to open off them, were put into buildings, privacy became the norm, and the smaller family began to take shape.  

Immersed in a boarding school with my parents living on another continent, I searched for comfort and found it in Charlotte Brontë’s novel of a young orphan struggling to make her way in Victorian England.

Although considered by some to be shocking when it was published in 1847, it was a sensation and has never been out of print since. 

"Do you think," she cries to the rich Mr Rochester, the man she loves, "because I am poor, plain and little, that I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart."

Complete with Gothic frills, brooding landscapes and high drama, leavened with intelligence and psychological acuity, Jane Eyre is a love story which contains one of the great cries for equality in literature.

Who could fail to respond? I certainly did, and I remember it every time I embark on a new novel.